The field of automated essay evaluation seeks to build systems that evaluate the overall quality of essays consistent with how a human would score those essays. An accurate, reliable automated evaluation engine can provide a large time and cost savings over manual human scoring alternatives. In developing automated scoring systems, developers seek to generate features that accurately approximate human impressions of essay quality. One such human impression is the coherence of a text being evaluated. A reader's ability to construct meaning from text, sometimes referred to as coherence, is greatly influenced by the presence and organization of cohesive elements in the text. Systems and methods as described herein provide a solution to the problem of measuring text coherence by providing mechanisms for extracting coherence-indicating metrics from a text under consideration.